A Disease in the Public Mind (10 page)

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That word, “wealth,” requires another pause to discuss an invention that began transforming southern agriculture and southern thinking about slavery, virtually from the moment it appeared: Eli Whitney's cotton gin. Born in Connecticut, Whitney was one of those geniuses who saw better ways to make or improve everything from farm machinery to muskets. The big problem with raising cotton was the need to separate the fibers from their seeds, a job that required hours of painstaking labor. Whitney's gin combined a wire screen and small wire hooks to pull the cotton through, while brushes removed the lint to prevent jams. The gin multiplied the productivity—and profits—of raising cotton fifty times above the previous wearisome reliance on human hands.

This intrusion of such a totally unexpected invention (during Washington's first term as president) is perhaps the best reply to those who claim the
founders failed to do enough to eliminate slavery. In 1790, there were only six slave states. The number steadily rose with the enormous profits from raising cotton. With the rise came an ever-growing need for more slaves to plant and pick the cotton. The arrival of “King Cotton” is a prime example of the way unexpected events and ideas intrude on a people and a nation, rendering assumptions about the future obsolete.
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For George Washington, slavery remained a troubling question, even while he took on the task of making his vision of a strong president into a working reality. An important reason why slavery remained in the forefront of his thoughts was the influence of the Marquis de Lafayette. By the time the war ended, the Marquis was calling Washington his “adopted father” and unburdening his mind to him on all sorts of subjects. Nothing troubled him more than slavery. Lafayette was especially upset to discover Americans had returned to the slave trade after the war ended. How could any American “perpetrate” such a thing “under our dear flag of liberty, the stars and stripes?” he asked.

As early as 1786, the year before the Constitutional Convention, Washington wrote to a friend, John Francis Mercer, that he hoped “never to possess another slave by purchase.” Among his first wishes was to see a plan adopted by the Virginia legislature “by which slavery . . . can be abolished by slow sure & imperceptible degrees.” He voiced a similar sentiment to Robert Morris, America's leading financier, in that same year. “There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it [slavery].”
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These words are evidence of how far George Washington had traveled from the complacent slave owner of the 1760s, enjoying the wealth and the dozens of slaves that widowed Martha Custis had brought to their 1759 marriage. The master of Mount Vernon was a tough taskmaster, who appraised his slaves' work with a critical eye. He had no illusions that the plantation's blacks enjoyed their bondage and were eager to work hard for him. “There are few Negroes who will work unless there is a constant eye on them,” he told Martha during his presidency.

Washington did not flinch from having disobedient or recalcitrant slaves whipped. But he also told his overseers that he wanted “to feed & cloath them well, & be careful of them in sickness.” Washington's account books record a steady flow of payments to both black and white doctors for ailing slaves. He clearly disagreed with the British West Indian attitude of treating slaves as easily replaced parts of the plantation business, giving them minimum care or consideration as human beings.

Washington also recognized the validity of slave marriage, which had no legal standing in Virginia. As he grew older, he became very sensitive on this point. He refused to break up marriages by selling the husband or wife. “To disperse families I have an utter aversion,” he told one correspondent. He also tried to vary his slaves' diet by giving them permission to hunt and fish and tend gardens. Some Mount Vernon slaves owned boats and guns. One recalled that Washington often asked his permission to use his boat for a row on the Potomac, and always made a point of returning it exactly where the slave had left it.
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The Master of Mount Vernon was also ready to recognize talent and leadership among his blacks. He appointed several slaves as overseers of his outlying farms, and rewarded them if they did a good job. He remarked that one appointee, Davy, “carries on his business as well as the white overseers.” To improve his dinner table, Davy received extra livestock, such as three hogs when they were slaughtered each year, and he enjoyed larger and more comfortable quarters than his fellow slaves. When it came to talent and willingness to work, Washington was remarkably free of race prejudice. Advertising for a good bricklayer, he told one man he did not care whether the artisan came from “Asia, Africa, or Europe.”
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CHAPTER 5

The Forgotten Emancipator

No matter how much he grew in his appreciation and understanding of blacks as human beings, George Washington remained aware that slavery could not be eliminated without endangering the still-fragile American union. As president, he devoted most of his time and energy to establishing the new office as a key factor in this political enterprise. The nation swarmed with people hostile to a strong executive, and they soon found a leader in Thomas Jefferson, who had been in Paris as America's ambassador when the new national charter was created. Although Jefferson had agreed to serve as Washington's secretary of state, he had deep reservations about the wisdom of the new Constitution. He would have preferred simply to update the Articles of Confederation.

When President Washington declared America neutral in the war that erupted between England and Revolutionary France in 1793, Jefferson formed a pro-French political party. His followers were soon attacking the president savagely in newspapers and pamphlets. Pro-French mobs surged through the streets of Philadelphia to demonstrate in front of Washington's residence. In a letter to a European friend, Jefferson described the president
as a “Samson who had allowed himself to be shorn by the harlot, England.” One Jeffersonian journalist, James Thomson Callender, offered a toast at a public dinner “to the speedy death of President Washington.”
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In the midst of this foreign policy turmoil, over the Allegheny Mountains came an even starker threat to disunion—the upheaval in western Pennsylvania that many people called “The Whiskey Rebellion.” The name was in some respects a misnomer. The western counties had long had a surly relationship to the distant state and federal governments in Philadelphia. When Washington's secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, imposed a tax on the whiskey western farmers distilled from their grain, surliness rapidly became hostility.

Rabble-rousers denounced the “eastern aristocrats,” and federal agents who tried to collect the taxes became targets for threats and harassment. From Canada, the British watched this development with considerable interest. They had hopes of confining their former colonies to the eastern seaboard, and they were arming and arousing the Indian tribes in the Ohio River Valley to launch a war of terror and murder against the Americans entering these fertile lands. A secession of the western counties of Pennsylvania, and perhaps of Virginia and North Carolina, fit neatly into this nasty plan. Some sort of satellite nation could be fabricated from these malcontents, financed by British pounds sterling.

President Washington soon saw the whiskey rebels as a menace to the Union. He summoned fifteen thousand militia from Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania and put one of his best soldiers in command of it—Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, a brilliant cavalry leader during the Revolution. When this well-armed host descended on the whiskey rebels, their bravado vanished. In a few days they were pleading for mercy. The president pardoned them all, satisfied that he had made a very large point: the federal union was
perpetual
and its laws were to be obeyed by everyone in the nation.

Jefferson and his followers pointed to the lack of resistance and claimed that Washington had made a political mountain out of this local molehill.
President Washington let them talk. He was content to have set an example to which other presidents could turn. It fit nicely into the central purpose of his presidency—to create an office that had the power to deal with crises without waiting for an indecisive Congress to make up its collective mind.
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Unfortunately, this foreign and domestic turmoil convinced Washington that it would be a grave mistake to bring an issue as divisive as emancipation before the public. Recently, historians have found evidence that the president was seriously considering it. In 1794, he discussed with his confidential secretary, Tobias Lear, the possibility of selling his western lands to enable him to “liberate a certain species of property which I possess, very repugnantly to my own feelings.” But he reluctantly abandoned this idea, which might well have given slavery a mortal wound, if not a deathblow.
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In 1796, the final year of his second term, Washington found himself bombarded with pleas to run for president again. Shrewd politician that he was, he saw this would play into the hands of the Jeffersonians, who would orate about him becoming “president for life.” He was also a very tired man. But he remained deeply concerned about the future of this nation to which he had devoted forty-five years of his life. He decided to issue a statement explaining why he chose not to seek a third term—and also advising the American people on the course he hoped they would pursue to reach that elusive goal proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence—happiness.

The result was a document instantly christened “The Farewell Address” and printed in virtually every newspaper in the nation. It contained a great deal of good advice, based on Washington's experience as a general and president. He urged everyone to avoid “passionate attachments” to foreign nations. He praised “morality and religion” as the “great pillars of human happiness.” But at the head of his list of concerns was the issue that remained central to his vision of America's future—the federal union.

“The unity of government which constitutes you one people . . . is a main Pillar. . . of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home; your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty
which you so highly prize.” It must be guarded with “jealous anxiety” to shatter “any attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.” Washington admitted that the South, the North, the East, and the West might have special interests or strengths. But they must be first of all
American
“by an indissoluble community of interest as
one
nation.”
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None of the other large topics Washington touched on came close to inspiring the emotional intensity he poured into the passages exhorting Americans to preserve this bedrock foundation of his hopes for America—and his vision of a nation united by “fraternal affection.”

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Two years after Washington left the presidency, Thomas Jefferson challenged this principle of the primacy of the Union. President John Adams and the Federalist Party majority in Congress, enraged by the abuse Adams was receiving from the Jeffersonian press for his refusal to alter the policy of neutrality in the ongoing war between Great Britain and France, passed two laws that have become known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. One gave the federal government the power to deport any alien whom it deemed dangerous to the security of the republic. The second empowered the government to prosecute anyone who libeled the president and other officers of the government.

Federalist-appointed judges soon had several Jeffersonian newspaper editors on trial. None of them could prove the insults and wild accusations they had flung at the president. The idea that a newspaper was supposed to tell the truth would not be accepted by most editors and reporters for another hundred years. The newspaper remained the “political engine” that President Adams had said it was twenty-five years earlier, on the eve of the Revolution.

Jeffersonian-Republican outrage soon produced an excess to counter this Federalist assault on a free press. Jefferson persuaded James Madison to join him in writing letters to the legislatures of Virginia and the new state of
Kentucky, urging them to protest this federal edict. Madison was temperate in his appeal. Jefferson was extreme. He assured the Kentucky legislature that a state could “nullify” any act of Congress, whenever it felt the law impinged on the rights or interests of its citizens.

Washington was so appalled, he appealed to Patrick Henry to emerge from retirement and persuade Virginia to disavow her allegiance to this ruinous doctrine. Henry died before he could respond to the summons. While Washington sought another spokesman, the grim reaper began stalking him too.
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In 1786, the Marquis de Lafayette had informed Washington that he had bought a plantation in the French South American colony of Cayenne (later French Guiana), where he planned to free a group of slaves and educate them to demonstrate to the world that blacks could live and work independently. He hoped Washington would join him in this enterprise. The older man wrote his adopted son a letter, praising “the benevolence of your heart,” and warmly approved the experiment. But he did not accept Lafayette's invitation to become his partner. Instead, Washington sadly wished that “a like spirit would diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people of this country but I despair of seeing it.”
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